So past week I started to build a gambling app on Ionic, the problem is that I was not aware of point number 20 (Contests, sweepstakes, lotteries, raffles, and gambling) on App Store Review Guidelines for Apple Apps, which conflicts with the current requirements I have now for this application.

I haven’t done that much but from what I saw, I can say that this is a really good framework for Hybrid App Development, what concerns me now is (since I’m not going to be able to build this as an app but as a mobile web website), are there any deal breaker performance and cross-browsing considerations that I’ll face by using Ionic?

To mitigate possible issues, I’m planning to do this:

Add a Gulp task for minification, concatenation, image reduction so my site can load faster.

If the device that is trying to access my app does not have a decent browser, I’ll redirect it to the browser version (maybe add a message saying that the browsers is not supported?).

SEO matters a lot on my company, so I would need to do some work with PhantomJS to have this site correctly ranked.

My question is: Is Ionic the right choice for me? Maybe Ratchet+Backbone.js+Browserify would address more mobile web devices and it would haver better performance than Angular+Ionic in terms of page loading?

I don’t want to stop using this awesome framework, and I really love Angular hehe, but I would like to know if it’s the right choice for this app, so any help you could give me it would be very valuable. Thanks!

I think the real question is “should I use Ionic to build a browser-based web app?” (that is, I’d recommend optimizing the thread title)

My Ionic app is destined for iTunes and Google Play, but I’ve been testing it in the browser – and I’m getting fairly good performance. There’s no way to hide the browser chrome on iPad, and the Android browser has an annoying title bar, but I don’t have any other complaints so far. I don’t also have any real benchmarks, though I think Ionic would be a respectable choice.

Have you considered other alternatives such as React, Mithril, and Polymer? React wants to be used with JSX, but I found that it feels very natural with CoffeeScript as well. Polymer sounds like it’d be really awesome, but it is at the moment really slow (unless you’re using a very modern browser); if you like that sort of UI, perhaps you could find a middle ground with Angular. So… have fun shopping around

Yeah, I think I’ll stick with Angular, not sure if I’ll keep working with Ionic but what I’m thinking is that I’ll only have issues with Android 2.3 probably. I’m still not completely sure if I can’t deploy this as an app.

@mhartington do you know what’s the mobile web coverage for Angular-Material? My client only cares for Android 4.0+ and iOS. Besides that they are ok to redirect to the responsive desktop site (I’m planning to build that one with Bootstrap 3).

If I keep on the Ionic track, I’m afraid I’ll have to add extra tasks to make it comply with web, but that’s something that I’ll need to do with other techs also, so I don’t see the point of moving away from Ionic.

@luisrudge imho, I would say yes if it’s ONLY accessed from iOS and new Android versions, but since Ionic does not have gulp tasks setup for optimizing you code to run as a web application (minification, concatenation, image optimization, etc), and since any device (read crappy android 2.3 and windows phones which I don’t think they are supported) can access to the web app, it’s possible that someone is going to have a buggy experience running your Ionic project setup as a web app, so you might want to prevent that by detecting user agent or something like that, again, those approaches are not out of the box on the Ionic initial setup, those are things you would need to configure by yourself.